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Much of the progress in medicine since I was a medical student has involved expensive, high-tech diagnostic tests and therapies – a trend that has accelerated recently and worries health economists and politicians alike because it boosts healthcare costs.

That's why we mustn't forget that there is an important role as well for ingenious, low-tech, less expensive approaches.

The most recent cancer breakthrough, a treatment for advanced lymphoma called "CAR-T" approved by the FDA in October, is an utterly astonishing tour de force.

Seasonal influenza — the flu — sickens and kills many Americans in a good year, and this is already a bad one. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since 2010, flu has annually caused "between 9.2 million and 35.6 million illnesses, between 140,000 and 710,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 and 56,000 deaths." In this season, which began in November and won't end until March, hospital emergency rooms are overflowing, deaths are running ahead of recent years and pharmacies are low on the anti-flu drug Tamiflu and intravenous solutions needed to keep patients hydrated.

Adam Smith, the eighteenth century economist and philosopher, offered insights into human nature and economics that seem particularly relevant today. "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices," he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.

We're seeing evidence of that in the current effort to discredit and diminish genetically engineered foods and to attack their defenders in the scientific community. The chief perpetrators of this black marketing campaign are lobbyists for the organic agriculture and "natural products" industries and their enablers.

On Sunday, CBS's 60 Minutes ran a segment on the propaganda role of Russian news network RT , or Russia Today .

When asked about meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, RT 's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan responded, "There's nothing illegal that we did...nothing murky."

She went on to dismiss the U.S. intelligence reports that accused the network of using the Internet and social media to conduct "strategic messaging for the Russian government" and that its programming is "aimed at undermining viewers' trust of U.S. democratic procedures."

Neomi Rao, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, noted in a December op-ed that "in the previous administration, agencies frequently exceeded their legal authority when imposing costly rules [and that s]ome agencies announced important policy changes without following the formal rule-making process."

That will end, she said, because the Trump administration is committed "to a regulatory policy that actually works."